The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 22 April 2008
by Jules Verne
There was a time when people believed that the Earth was hollow. Deep inside the planet, a great cavern housed an Edenic world of dinosaurs and twelve-foot tall primitive man. Or, perhaps, it was the void to which Atlantis had sunk, and where now a great advanced civilization of man lived, maybe even the origin of UFOs, flying out through great openings at the north and south poles. There might be some people out there now who harbor such bizarre theories. The deepest hole yet drilled was only seven and a half miles deep, just 0.19% of the way down. Our best theories tell us the center of the Earth is still molten, heated by radioactive decay in the primordial rock. Not a hospitable place; not easily, or ever, visited (Hollywood fantasies like The Core notwithstanding). Jules Verne, the father of modern science fiction, took the journey back in the 1864. In this classic novel, Harry (or Axel in the original French) visits with his uncle professor Hardwigg in Germany. There, the professor shares with him a fragment from a sixteenth century Icelandic scientist, Arne Saknussemm, a tiny piece that suggests he made a trip to the center of the Earth through the maw of a dormant Icelandic volcano (Mt. Snaefell, which does exist). Hardwigg is determined to repeat the trip, and within days, he and reluctant Harry are off to the Arctic. Harry is the narrator of the tale. He complains much of the journey, the lack of food, the long hours, the deep darkness in the Earth's caverns, and persists in hoping the professor will give up and turn around. They make their way down to a subterranean ocean, where their adventure on the Central Sea is also central to the novel. Their discoveries are fantastical, and, of course, there are the improbable things that keep the book from being an excursion in complete darkness. The vapors over the sea are aglow, and the batteries for their lamps last for months, and the Earth isn't as hot or suffocating within as even 19th century scientists surmised. The narration has a boyish quality, and is given to relentless superlatives and extremes. Nothing happens in small measure in the novel, and this can be somewhat tiresome. Unintended by the author (perhaps?) is the glimpse in to scientific theory in its time, even if the book is a fantasy. There are some surprising tidbits of theory that endure, others that can be seen for the nascent ideas that they were. Verne was good at prognostication, and was able to apply considerable insight when integrating science in his fiction. Some of it turns out to be almost preposterously extreme, written, it seems, for a laugh. The book is a romp, a light adventure bouncing off the walls of the great empty caverns hundreds of leagues below the planet's surface. (The book was made into a movie almost fifty years ago, and the popular English version (the 1965 printing is referred to here) is somewhat different from the original French.) Certainly, a classic of the genre.
Also by Verne: [Paris in the Twentieth Century] [From the Earth to the Moon]